The suicide bombing was the most deadly attack in Pakistan in the past three years [AFP]

The death toll in one of Pakistan’s bloodiest attacks that targeted an election campaign event continues to rise as the country prepares for general elections later this month.

The number of dead increased to 149 with 189 other people wounded in Mastung district in Balochistan province, senior police official Qaim Lashari told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosives at an election rally of the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP) in the southwestern town of Drigarh, about 35km south of the provincial capital Quetta, on Friday afternoon.

Several of the wounded are still receiving medical treatment, provincial health official Mustafa Jamali said on Saturday.

The World Transformed and No One in America Noticed

The world transformed and nobody in the West noticed. India and Pakistan have joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The 17 year-old body since its founding on June 15, 2001 has quietly established itself as the main alliance and grouping of nations across Eurasia. Now it has expanded from six nations to eight, and the two new members are the giant nuclear-armed regional powers of South Asia, India, with a population of 1.324 billion and Pakistan, with 193.2 million people (both in 2016).

In other words, the combined population of the SCO powers or already well over 1.5 billion has virtually doubled at a single stroke.

The long-term global consequences of this development are enormous. It is likely to prove the single most important factor insuring peace and removing the threat of nuclear war over South Asia and from 20 percent of the human race. It now raises the total population of the world in the eight SCO nations to 40 percent, including one of the two most powerful thermonuclear armed nations (Russia) and three other nuclear powers (China, India and Pakistan).

This development is a diplomatic triumph especially for Moscow. Russia has been seeking for decades to ease its longtime close strategic ally India into the SCO umbrella. This vision was clearly articulated by one of Russia’s greatest strategic minds of the 20th century, former Premier and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who died in 2015. In the past China quietly but steadfastly blocked the India’s accession, but with Pakistan, China’s ally joining at the same time, the influence of Beijing and Moscow is harmonized.

The move can only boost Russia’s already leading role in the diplomacy and national security of the Asian continent. For both Beijing and Delhi, the road for good relations with each other and the resolution of issues such as sharing the water resources of the Himalayas and investing in the economic development of Africa now runs through Moscow. President Vladimir Putin is ideally placed to be the regular interlocutor between the two giant nations of Asia.

The move also must be seen as a most significant reaction by India to the increasing volatility and unpredictability of the United States in the global arena. In Washington and Western Europe, it is fashionable and indeed reflexively inevitable that this is entirely blamed on President Donald Trump.

But in reality this alarming trend goes back at least to the bombing of Kosovo by the United States and its NATO allies in 1998, defying the lack of sanction in international law for any such action at the time because other key members of the United Nations Security Council opposed it.

Since then, under four successive presidents, the US appetite for unpredictable military interventions around the world – usually bungled and open-ended – has inflicted suffering and instability on a wide range of nations, primarily in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen) but also in Eurasia (Ukraine) and South Asia (Afghanistan).

The accession of both India and Pakistan to the SCO is also a stunning repudiation of the United States.

The US has been Pakistan’s main strategic ally and protector over the past more than 70 years since it achieved independence (Dean Acheson, secretary of state through the 1949-53 Truman administration was notorious for his racist contempt for all Indians, as well as for his anti-Semitism and hatred of the Irish).

US-Pakistan relations have steadily deteriorated even since the United States charged into Afghanistan in November 2001, but through it all, US policymakers have always taken for granted that Islamabad at the end of the day would “stay on the reservation” and ultimately dance to their tune.

The United States has courted India for 17 years since President Bill Clinton’s state visit in 2000, which I covered in his press party. Current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a Joint Session of Congress in 2016, the ultimate accolade of approval by the US political establishment for any foreign leader.

US policymakers and pundits have endlessly pontificated that India, as an English speaking democracy would become America‘s ideological and strategic partner in opposing the inevitable rise of China on the world stage. It turned out to be a fantasy.

During the era of the Cold War, the “loss” of any nation of the size and standing of India or Pakistan to a rival or just independent ideological camp and security grouping would have provoked waves of shock, hurt, rage and even openly expressed fear in the US media.

However, what we have seen following this latest epochal development is far more extraordinary. The decisions by Delhi and Islamabad have not been praised, condemned or even acknowledged in the mainstream of US political and strategic debate. They have just been entirely ignored. To see the leaders and opinion-shapers of a major superpower that still imagines it is the dominant hyper-power conduct its affairs in this way is potentially worrying and alarming.

The reality is that we live in a multipolar world – and that we have clearly done so at least since 2001. However, this obvious truth will continue to be denied in Washington, London and Paris in flat defiance of the abundantly clear facts.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) annual report on the current state of armaments, disarmament and international security notes that despite the overall decrease in global nuclear weapons year-on-year, India and Pakistan are doing the opposite.

New Delhi (Sputnik) – A report released by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has revealed that the two South Asian neighbors and traditional rivals India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear stockpiles at the same pace, while Pakistan still remains ahead of India in terms of the number of nuclear warheads.

“India, which had an estimated 120-130 nuclear warheads as per 2017 report, now has 130-140 warheads. Similarly, Pakistan, which had 130-140 warheads now has increased to 140-150 warheads. Both countries are also developing new land, sea and air-based missile delivery systems,” the report reads.

The SIPRI report claims that there are nine countries which have nuclear warheads, which include Russia, the US, the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.

Similarly, going by the SIPRI estimates, another nuclear country in Asia, China is continuing to modernize its nuclear weapon delivery systems and is slowly increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal. The country now has an estimated 280 nuclear warheads, ten more than last year.

The US and Russia still own the bulk of the approximately 14,465 nuclear weapons that exist in the world. Together, they account for nearly 92 percent of all nuclear weapons present in the world today.

Along the 786 km-long Line of Control (LoC) which divides the State of Jammu Kashmir between India and Pakistan, sporadic cross-border military gunfire between both countries is not that unusual.

However, this weekend, in the region of Noushera, Rajouri and Akhnoor sectors of Jammu and Kashmir, more than 40,000 Indians have fled their homes and shops amid the fourth consecutive day of intense shelling from Pakistani military forces, the Economic Times reports.

In the latest report from Indian 24 News, cross-border firing between both countries continues along the international border in the Kanachak and Pargwal sectors in Jammu, besides the LoC in the Nowshera area of Rajouri district on Sunday evening.

The number of people killed on the Indian side this month has risen to 13 including three armymen, three BSF personnel and seven civilians. The toll is almost as high as number of causalities on the Indian side in the entire of 2017, when nearly a dozen people including security personnel were killed on the entire border from Kathua to Poonch district. In most of the villages, almost entire populations have shifted to safer places fearing an escalation of firing along the border. Sources said that most of the people had shifted to their relatives’ homes.

Arnia, a border town in the Jammu district in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, India, with a population of 18,000, is now deserted as the intense shelling from Pakistan drove residents to safer grounds.

The Economic Times describes a first-hand account of the chaos in Arnia, as 80-year-old Yashpal and his family huddled in their house until two mortar shells damaged it.

“It had happened during the 1965 and the 1971 wars. Such large number of mortar bombs had not since fallen in Arnia,” Yashpal said.

Sub Divisional Police Officer (SDPO), R S Pura, Surinder Choudhary stated, “Arnia town has been vacated. We have evacuated large number of people from Arnia and border hamlets…Most of hamlets are now vacated.”

Choudhary, who coordinated the evacuation of the border towns from R S Pura and Arnia sectors, said homes and livestock had experienced the brunt of the damage from Pakistani shelling.

Deputy Commissioner Jammu, Kumar Rajeev Ranjan said a total of 58 villages in Arnia and Suchetgarh sectors of Jammu district had been affected by the military clashes.

“Over 36,000 border dwellers have migrated from their homes”, Ranjan said, and he added that 131 animals have perished, 93 injured, and widespread damage to structures.

An unidentified Indian journalist reports on the frontlines, as Indian troops return fire into Pakistan using mortars.

A local Indian media outlet shows the death and destruction erupting on the LoC.

While the world focuses on the Korean Peninsula for the potential outbreak of World War III, many should redirect their attention to the LoC between the Indian–Pakistan border, as this latest flare-up in military clashes between two nuclear states could spiral out of control.

America’s relations with nations around the world are collapsing. Donald Trump’s frequent xenophobic and racist outbursts, unprecedented in modern history, have resulted in foreign ministries around the world calling in senior U.S. diplomats for explanations about Trump’s comments. Trump’s actions have resulted in more damaging consequences for overall global stability.

After Trump, during a White House meeting with a congressional delegation, referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and 55 African countries as “shitholes,” the U.S. ambassador to Panama John Feeley figured the time had come to announce his resignation. Undoubtedly, Feeley was aware that even the well-heeled owners of condominiums in the Trump Ocean Club Panama hotel-condo complex had had enough of Trump when they decided to remove the Trump name from what is now known only as the Ocean Club Panama Owners Association. The move was a sign of worsening U.S.-Panamanian relations. What happened in Panama illustrates that it is not merely U.S. foreign policy that is being adversely affected by Trump, but also U.S. economic interests.

The United States is vying with China and France for control of Africa’s natural resources. Trump’s actions have placed into jeopardy ongoing U.S. oil, construction, and rare-earth mineral extraction business opportunities in Africa.

Condemnations of Trump’s “shit hole” remarks were swift. The African Union demanded Trump apologize to not only Africans, but all people of African descent in the world for comments over which the union expressed its “infuriation, disappointment and outrage.” South Africa’s Foreign Ministry called in the U.S. Embassy’s Charge d’Affaires in Pretoria to deliver a diplomatic protest note.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) condemned Trump’s remarks as “repulsive.” U.S. diplomats in Haiti, Ghana, Senegal, and Botswana were also called on the carpet by foreign ministry officials. Senegal’s president Macky Sall said, “I am shocked by the words of President Trump on Haiti and Africa,” adding, “I reject them and condemn vigorously. Africa and the black race deserve the respect and consideration of all.” For some African countries, Trump’s insult was the second slap they received. Earlier, Trump placed Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Chad on a U.S. visa ban list, although Sudan was later removed from the list.

The Burkina Faso newspaper L’Observateur Paalga ran perhaps the most embarrassing headline for Americans, particularly U.S. military personnel stationed in the West African nation: “Warm kisses from the shithole countries,” adding that Trump is a “cursed clown” and a “president of shit.”

Trump’s abrupt severance of $2 billion in U.S. security assistance to Pakistan has all-but-doomed Indian-Pakistani diplomatic talks over the issue of Kashmir, a region contested between the two regional nuclear powers. In a tweet having severe repercussions on the Indian sub-continent and all of south Asia, Trump accused Pakistan of “lies and deceit” over its actions in neighboring Afghanistan.

Not to be outdone by Trump, American neoconservative ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, whose Sikh parents hail from India, declared that Pakistan had played “a double game for years.” She also announced the immediate cancellation of $255 million in U.S. assistance to Pakistan.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry called in David Hale, the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, for an explanation of Trump’s statement, including Trump’s reference to U.S. assistance to Pakistan over a 15-year period amounting to $33 billion.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif responded to Trump in his own tweet: “Pres Trump quoted figure of $33 billion given to PAK over last 15 yrs, he can hire a US based Audit firm on our expense to verify this figure & let the world know who is lying & deceiving.”

Pakistan’s National Security Committee issued a statement following Trump’s outburst: “Recent statements and articulation by the American leadership were completely incomprehensible as they contradicted facts manifestly, struck with great insensitivity at the trust between two nations built over generations, and negated the decades of sacrifices made by the Pakistani nation.”

While the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi was gleeful over Trump’s tweet about Pakistan, it was confronted with a closer Pakistani-Chinese alliance. China announced that it was building an offshore maritime port off the strategic port city of Gwadar. And in a financial blowback against the U.S. Treasury, Pakistan announced that Pakistani-Chinese trade would be based on the Chinese yuan and no longer in U.S. dollars. In addition, Pakistan was looking at several billions in investments arising from China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, an infrastructure project encompassing the land, sea, and air routes around the globe.

Left picking up the pieces from Trump’s “Twitter fingers” was the Commander of the U.S Central Command (CENTCOM), General Joseph Votel, responsible for combined U.S.-Pakistani operations against jihadist guerrilla forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s wild Northwest Frontier Province on the Afghan border. Votel placed an emergency phone call from his Tampa headquarters to Pakistani army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa. The essence of that call was that Bajwa and the Pakistani military should just ignore Trump and understand that the status quo ante — before Trump became president — still applied to U.S.-Pakistani security links.

As Trump’s outbursts on Twitter and in meetings continued, U.S. diplomats and military commanders were forced to repeat what Hale and Votel faced with Pakistan. Talks between North and South Korea aimed at reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula were hampered by Trump’s continuing references to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “little rocket man.” In a bizarre statement to The Wall Street Journal, Trump said, “I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un. Trump later denied he made the statement, accusing the newspaper of publishing “fake news,” but the Journal made the transcript and audio tape publicly available, and they proved that Trump was lying.

After the Trump administration backed a second term for Honduran right-wing dictator-president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who won re-election as the result of massive fraud over his left-center opponent, Salvador Nasralla, the Honduran opposition announced a boycott of U.S. fast-food restaurants in the country, including Wendy’s, Dunkin Donuts, McDonald’s, Denny’s and Pizza Hut. It appears that going down the toilet with the Trump brand globally are other U.S. brands. Trump’s repeated xenophobic comments about Mexico and Mexicans has resulted in a Mexican boycott of McDonald’s, Walmart, and Coca-Cola. The governor of the Mexican state of Campeche announced that the state government would no longer purchase vehicles from Ford. Governor Alejandro Moreno urged that similar action be taken across Mexico.

Trump canceled a planned February 2018 visit to London over his pique concerning the building of a new U.S. embassy in Vauxhall, on the south bank of the Thames River, an area Trump believed was an “off location.” Trump was to have dedicated the new embassy, but criticized the diplomatic post’s move from Grosvenor Square and the subsequent sale of the old embassy grounds as a “bad deal” made by Barack Obama. The move was authorized not by Obama but by George W. Bush. In any case, the cancellation left British government and opposition figures both relieved and appalled over Trump’s off-putting demeanor.

From Palestine to Botswana and Haiti to Britain, Trump’s actions have made the United States a pariah and outlier. There is very little U.S. diplomats can do, but be called in by foreign ministries to be lectured on good manners, propriety, and behavior. Today, every American should feel absolute shame in their president and their country.

Hawaii’s ballistic missile attack on Saturday turned out to be nothing more than fat-fingered “fake news” by State officials. However, a far more significant threat of nuclear war is growing on the border between India and Pakistan, called the Line of Control (LoC), which continues to be generally ignored by Western media outlets.

Indian Army Chief General Bipin Rawat said Friday his military was ready to call Pakistan’s “nuclear bluff” and carry out aggressive military operations across the border.

“We will call the (nuclear) bluff of Pakistan. If we will have to really confront the Pakistanis, and a task is given to us, we are not going to say we cannot cross the border because they have nuclear weapons. We will have to call their nuclear bluff,” Gen. Rawat warned, responding to a question during a press conference on the “possibility of Pakistan using its nuclear weapons in case the situation along the border deteriorates,” said the Hindustan Times.

On Saturday, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif unleashed a Tweetstorm denouncing Rawat’s comments as “very irresponsible. Amounts to invitation for nuclear encounter. If that is what they desire, they are welcome to test our resolve. The general’s doubt would swiftly be removed, inshallah.”

“Very irresponsible statement by Indian Army Chief,not befitting his office. Amounts to invitation for nuclear encounter.If that is what they desire,they are welcome to test our resolve.The general’s doubt would swiftly be removed, inshallah.”

8:56 AM – 13 Jan 2018

“The threatening and irresponsible statement by the Indian Army Chief today is representative of a sinister mindset that has taken hold of India. Pakistan has demonstrated deterrence capability,” he tweeted.

“These are not issues to be taken lightly. There must not be any misadventure based on miscalculation. Pakistan is fully capable of defending itself,” he added.

The spokesperson of Pakistan’s Foreign Office Mohammad Faisal also criticised Gen. Rawat’s comments as very “irresponsible.” Further, the Pakistani army said its nuclear weapons have deterred India from launching another full-scale conventional war, as both nuclear superpowers are playing chicken.

Escalating the war of words, Pakistan army spokesman Asif Ghafoor said on state-run television, “should they wish to test our resolve, they may try and see it for themselves. We have a credible nuclear capability, exclusively meant for threat from east. But we believe it’s a weapon of deterrence, not a choice.”

The Line of Control (LoC) refers to a heavily militarized zone in Jammu and Kashmir, in which it splits some of the India-Pakistani border. In 2017 alone, the Indian Army killed 138 Pakistani troops in tactical and retaliatory operations along the LoC. In the same period, 28 Indian soldiers perished. In late December, we reported on an intense battle between Indian and Pakistani forces leaving 4 Indian troops dead, where it was believed that Pakistan was the aggressor.

Both countries have a long history of skirmishes on the LoC, and have even fought multiple wars on the border since India gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947. And as the beat of nuclear war gets louder between India and Pakistan, the LoC is one region which should be carefully monitored as conditions continue to deteriorate in 2018.

“We’re hoping that Pakistan will see this as an incentive, not a punishment,” a State Department official told reporters.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this recent animosity towards Pakistan has not gone over well. Pakistani Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif said in an interview that the U.S. has failed to behave as an ally, and as a result, Pakistan no longer views it as one.

“We do not have any alliance [with the US]…This is not how allies behave.”

If anything, Washington’s recent behavior has only pushed Pakistan into the open arms of America’s traditional rivals, China and Iran. China has long been providing financial and economic assistance of its own to Pakistan with plans to expand an economic partnership in the years to come.

China has already pledged to invest $57 billion in Pakistani infrastructure as part of the so-called “Belt and Road” initiative. Just last month, Pakistan announced it was considering a proposal to replace the U.S. dollar with the Chinese yuan for bilateral trade between Pakistan and China.

Following the Trump administration’s recent attacks on Pakistan, Pakistan confirmed that dropping the dollar was no arbitrary threat and immediately replaced the dollar with the Chinese yuan.

“Chinese investment in Pakistan is expected to reach over $46 billion by 2030 with the creation of a [China-Pakistan Economic Corridor] connecting Balochistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea with Kashgar, in Western China,” Harrison Akins, a researcher at the Howard Baker Center who focuses on Pakistan and China, toldNewsweek.

In the middle of last year, it was reported that China was considering establishing its own naval bases in Pakistan. These reports began to immediately resurface again in the past week, though Pakistan has vehemently denied that any such naval base will be built (even though Chinese military officials were the ones to expose the plan to build a naval base at Gwadar Port, in Balochistan).

Whether or not the reports are true, what is becoming apparent is that Pakistan will look to cooperate with China both economically and militarily while giving up its reliance on Washington.

“The history of Pakistan’s relationships with China and the United States also shows that Pakistan’s policy does not respond to strong-handedness, but to loyalty, and to being treated with dignity,” Madiha Afzal, a nonresident fellow at Brookings, said as reported by CNBC.

Further, according to the Times of Islamabad, Iranian and Pakistani defense ministers have held talks on Washington’s role in the region and have indicated a growing defense cooperation strategy between Tehran and Islamabad. Even before Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally try to isolate the two countries, the expanding relationship was already well underway – most likely the more truthful reason the Trump administration has targeted both of them.

Much to Washington’s dismay, this is only the beginning of the end of America’s role as an unchallenged global superpower. The Asia Times reports that Iran, China, and Pakistan are set to launch a “trilateral nexus” that would support economic development for as many as 3 billion people. The biggest obstacle to implementing such an economically viable nexus would actually lie in the growing economic power India, not the United States, which seems to be able to do little but taunt, threaten, and bully the ever-growing list of defiant states.

Without hesitation, Turkey, another country that is forging stronger ties with Russia, China, and Iran, also came to Iran and Pakistan’s aid. Turkey is a NATO ally.

“We cannot accept that some countries — foremost the US, Israel — to interfere in the internal affairs of Iran and Pakistan,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters before heading on a scheduled trip to France.

At this stage, both Turkey and Iran could end up joining the Chinese and Russian-led military alliance known as the Shanghai bloc, with Iran recently strengthening its military ties with China. Given China has both economic and military interests worth protecting in Pakistan, this Eastern alliance is spreading ever further by the day to the detriment of Washington.

It’s no wonder the European Union is practically building its own army given the number of countries that feel safe to rely on the United States’ so-called global leadership under Donald Trump are growing smaller by the day. And given the serious implications of Pakistan’s shift into China’s sphere of influence, it’s curious this story isn’t making the headlines.